Question:
What is the inner attitude to have about the big machlokes in Ponovezh Yeshivah, which has enveloped Eretz Yisrael for the last few years? It is hard to understand how such a prominent Yeshivah can have so much infighting amongst so many prominent people. Is there something more inner that was behind it?
Answer:
In the final generation, the concept of ra (evil) is unleashed from its potential and it becomes fully activated, as the Daas Tevunos speaks about at length. It becomes released everywhere, and this heavy amount of evil is to counter and prevent all the holiness [which will be when Mashiach arrives] so that there can be an equal counterbalance between good and evil.
However, machlokes is rooted in kedushah, because there is “one Torah” for the entire Jewish people, which extends from one Torah into two parts to the Torah: The Written Torah and the Oral Torah. That division is the root of all machlokes within Torah. This division extends further, where there can be two aspects within one matter: “2 dinim”, two different halachos, for each matter of the Torah. The division goes even further and then becomes either a safek (doubt) or a machlokes (argument), beginning with the very first machlokes in Klal Yisrael, which was about doing semichah on korbonos. All of that is the root and the extension of machlokes when it comes to kedushah, but when machlokes extends into the lower realms that are less spiritually refined, it becomes an actual machlokes, a heated divisiveness between people, and it draws its strength from the concept of machlokes that exists in Torah, in kedushah [because the kelipos, the side of evil, nurses its vitality from kedushah].
Chazal said that at first there is disagreement between Torah scholars when they argue about Torah together, and they become enemies to each other, but eventually they come to love each other. However, that is only when they are zocheh (meritorious), but when they are not zocheh, they remain enemies with each other. And this becomes manifest in their physical worlds, in the form of bad middos and unleashing their unrefined aspects of character at each other. When machlokes gets ugly like this, it is really rooted in the machlokes of the brothers versus Yosef. The brothers were so divided against Yosef that they couldn’t talk to him and they threw him into the pit lined with snakes and scorpions [to let him be killed there]. It is this kind of machlokes between people that prevents Mashiach ben Yosef and Mashiach ben Dovid from becoming connected with each other, which delays the Geulah. However, at its deepest root, even such a machlokes is rooted in a machlokes l’sheim shomayim, it is for the sake of Heaven – it is just that the machlokes “branches” [down into the lower worlds, where it becomes turned] into the opposite of l’sheim shomayim, where it nurses its vitality from the alma d’piruda, the disparate world that we live in, which are the lower realms of Creation.
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